A review by mattm
The Poincaré Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe by Donal O'Shea

4.0

Not an easy book, but it succeeded in bringing some really challenging higher-order math principles to a layman like me in a consciousness-changing way. I had read a lot about the curvature of space-time in books about Einsteinian physics, but I guess I always felt it was a conceptual analogy and never grasped that our universe is indeed finite and has a "shape," and then to contemplate what mathematical tools we would need to figure out which of several shapes it actually is. The insights into mathematics history and culture were also really enlightening.